The Doctor Is In: BBC Releases Trailer For Doctor Who Series 7

(Or, you know, Doctor Who series umpteen, if you go by the old calendar and include the Big Finish audio adventures. Which you should.)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following up on its teaser from earlier in the year, the BBC today released the trailer for the next season of Doctor Who, arriving this fall. And it's a good 'un. Obviously, avoid pressing the big "play" button if you wish to be totally unspoiled.

The My Little Pony crossover is, of course, called Doctor Whooves

Rather in opposition to the general critical consensus, I tend to think that Ecclestone's was the best performance of NewWho, and Tennant got quite a few of the best scripts, but many of the best performances and many of the best scripts saw the hand of Steven Moffat, who returns as showrunner for the new season with Caroline Skinner as Producer.

(Spoilers follow)

(No, really - spoilers, for the trailer itself - I have removed references to plot details revealed in Moffat and Skinner's Comic-Con panel, and to events which may be common knowledge, but are not referenced in the trailer - if you know what they are, you'll see why they are missing.)

Of course, if it's Moffat, there's going to be some River Song. Hopefully, he has gotten her overarching (and somewhat overwhelming) storyline largely out of his system at this point - after the shockingly obvious plot twist last season, the character could do with a more sparing treatment.

The trailer features some entertaining-looking one-offs (dinosaurs! Cleopatra Nefertiti! Possible Sherlock crossover what the heck why not!) and what look like meaty, arc-related returns of familiar bad guys. Possibly too familiar - one problem NewWho has had is that its big bads keep returning, and keep getting nerfed. The Dalek in Season 1's "Dalek" was genuinely terrifying, helped by Ecclestone's bravura performance - but by the last season we had candy-colored Daleks jobbing for futuristic Spitfires. Admittedly, we have yet to see a Dalek taken down with a baseball bat (oh, Ace, how I loved thee), but it may be a matter of time.

To be fair, it is a special baseball bat

The same thing happened to the Weeping Angels - terrifying the first time around, merely scary the second, and suffering from Moffat's occasionally Swiss army knifish approach to scary (yes, voices coming from dead people are terrifying. But if dead people can be expected to talk as a matter of course, less so). There are some rescarifying possibilities in the trailer, however (babies - always terrifying), and also some if-true-ludicrous-but-awesome rumors floating around about the possibilities of your enemies being public statuary.

Obligatory Olympic tie-in (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Ponds are back - like many others, I had been hoping throughout the early going of Toby Whithouse's season 6 episode The God Complex that Amara Karan would be joining the TARDIS as the Doctor's new companion, but of course that was exactly what she was there to do, and at this point one would require some temporal sleight of hand to fetch her back. But Karen Gillan does a good job of dealing with a character as broken by narrative as Amy, and Arthur Darvill's Rory is always a pleasure to watch.

Every season, I find myself thinking that this is probably it for Doctor Who as an entertainment property - that the strange combination of compactness and ferocity created by the smaller seasons (for those new to the Who - the first seven Doctors' combination of long seasons, multi-episode storylines and no budget at all led to a meditative, almost prog-rock feel to much of the action) would burn it out. Certainly, signs of fatigue have shown at times, although Torchwood seems to be the portrait in the Doctor's attic, taking on its worst foibles (glacial pacing, ludicrous plot twists, stunt casting) in the bold but ultimately unsuccessful Miracle Day.

And yet, Matt Smith's manic, gear-shifting Doctor is back, and once again I find myself eager to see where Moffat is going to put him. Maybe that's the thing with national institutions: their failures are forgotten more quickly, and their triumphs more eagerly celebrated.